Xiphias, on 07 November 2017 - 05:22 PM, said:
Taking longer to kill something doesn't mean that it requires more skill to use that weapon. It takes the same amount of skill to shoot one volley of streaks as the next. The skill that you are referencing is the ability to stay alive longer. That skill is mostly independent of the weapon being used.
The process of aiming and firing a guided missile is simple. Streaks, arguably are the simplest guided missile to operate in the game. Get your own lock, shoot. 99% of the time, you'll hit (with freak misses due to intervening terrain or players. Coincidentally, these are impossible to direct beyond which side the missiles hit on and are the least focused damage in the game.
Then you get to ATMs and LRMs, which become an increasingly difficult prediction game with distance and terrain. Can you predict the precise point to launch at someone running through a street on River City so your missiles hit them at the intersection? How about just blasting them with a PPC?
Probably at 200 meters with the launchers. Maybe at 400. Nearly impossible at more. Being able to judge shots is so difficult in MWO, these launchers generally have a 35% or so accuracy rating for me, right there in the 30-40% accuracy range I get asking other missile users for their data.
By comparison, my lasers are about 70%. For easy to use weapons, these guided missiles sure aren't easy to hit with. Perhaps there's some kind of skill involved in using them, after all?
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If I can kill a mech in 2 salvos instead of 5 by aiming then it was my skill that allowed me to be more effective. It doesn't take more skill to kill the target in 5 salvos. Skill is a measure of the amount of salvos that I am able to reduce.
Strangely enough, even missile boats can reduce the number of salvos needed to kill a target. The difference is, that's because they're getting better at reducing missing with a salvo completely. How many times have you seen dozens of missiles eat dirt instead of hitting a target? Someone failed to predict your track and wasted a salvo. That guy who chased you across an entire map square hosing you down with missiles because he found a good spot and herded you into making the mistake of going the wrong way for cover that wasn't working? Skills.
In a direct slugging match of course, that doesn't matter. But we all know direct fire >>> spread damage at that point. Even if it's LB-X vs. lasers, the more concentrated damage wins the day because even at relatively glancing blows, you're still putting more damage on the vital spots than the guy with the missiles.
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Streaks can kill a light mech in 1 shot if they are lucky or they can take 5 shots if they are extremely unlucky. Regardless there is no skill involved on the part of the pilot shooting the missile to change the number of salvos. Each salvo is as easy as the last and no skill can be used to reduce the number needed to kill a mech, only RNG.
Actually, angle of fire matters. Even with bone-seeking missiles, if you spray a side with destroyed locations, missiles seeking the undamaged ones will end up impacting on (and losing damage to) damage transfer trying to get to the unwrecked stuff. If that pilot who's on the right of a target with a destroyed RA/RT/RL fires from there rather than taking a moment to get around to the front or back- he will take more salvos to kill the target.
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You are confusing piloting skill, with weapon skill.
For a missile boat, piloting skill IS weapon skill. You have to position, you can't just point and paint a target with direct fire. In the time it takes to see and shoot someone with a Gauss (never mind an ERLL or PPC) from the edge of it's full damage range, it takes about three seconds for an LRM to arrive, plus lock time.
See how far you can get in three seconds, especially if you're already near cover and know where the shot is coming from. Bet you can easily pop back into cover and whiff the missiles, wasting the shot and ending up with a zero-trade.
Now, take that same missile boat who got himself into a position 300m, in cover from an angle to your front, while knowing his team is trading shots with you. He's just far enough away to get a high missile arc with his LRMs (you did know they're a shallower arc inside 250 or so, right?) and dumps a salvo into you with virtually no delay and no trail to easily follow.
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Being harder doesn't mean that something requires more skill. Is it harder to carry a cup of water 1 time or to carry 100 cups of water individually? Carrying more water is obviously harder, but it doesn't require any more skill than carrying 1 cup of water, just more time and effort. Difficulty can increase without skill increasing. If you can carry 100 cups of water in a single trip that would be an example of increased difficulty and skill because it takes more skill to carry 100 cups of water than it does to carry 1.
Is it harder to shoot someone 5 times in a given time limit (read: your robot's lifespan) or twice for success? Does it take more skill to nail a target with a scoped sniper rifle or an iron-sighted .22?
Success with a less inefficient tool means the user had to compensate with skill the tool failed to provide an effective substitute for.
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You can spread damage with lock on weapons. Wait until they fire, acquire lock while they are in cooldown, fire alpha, twist while still holding lock. Sure, you are more limited in the angle you can twist through, but you don't have to stare straight ahead to hold the lock.
That little nerf to lock-on arcs actually made this more difficult than before. Thanks, Chris! Bonus: If you're breaking lock each time, you have to fire even slower. And your opponent is closing on you, which means the more time you have between salvos, the sooner your opponent has hit the deadzone. That's when your missiles stop dealing damage, followed by you being dead. Oh, and lower DPS for good measure. Woot.
It also is a narrow enough arc now that you can (I do, all the time) casually aim for the crotch and core the missile boat, because if they twist legs and torso away, the lock goes bye-bye and you win.
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At high skill level that's absolutely true, that's why they are generally seen as weak weapons. At low skill level it's reversed, that's why you see players complaining about LRMs being overpowered at lower levels. The problem is that they can't be made better because they require such a low skill floor to use. If you want the weapons to get buffed they need to be harder to use.
Lemme say this.
Screw low skill players with regards to weapon balance. They are ignorant, incapable, and useless in terms of how weapons function, how effective they are against a real player, frequently even of average skill. They lack defensive skills we take for granted and every time we have a thread where Joe Noob whines about lurms, they get laughed at because "decent players don't have to worry about them".
Oh, they have a low skill floor to use. They're effective against people who don't even use their AMS hardpoints, much less a ROCK, against a weapon that gives a BIG FLASHING INCOMING MISSILES sign every time they're fired at them. People who have the situational awareness of the rock they failed to use for cover, frequently against a weapon that's been tracking them for 5 seconds because T5 lurmtaters are hiding in the back, firing at 900 meters. A weapon that can barely put four damage into the same location on a good day without Artemis. Which they aren't using. Because they're firing at a red square behind six pieces of terrain.
Weapons should never be balanced against
stupid and
ignorant. Weapons should be balanced against
competent use against
competent opponents. If a weapon is weak against competency, it is inherently understatted and in need of buffs, not nerfs.
I don't want weapons balanced on the experiences of players who can't figure out why they blew up mashing the alpha strike button, or why small lasers don't hit at 750 meters. I want them balanced based on the people who understand how to exploit the flaws of a weapon to render it virtually useless compared to other weapons that are not, so the flawed weapon becomes less flawed and used alongside equally polished weapon systems.
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One exception to that is that streaks are almost universally worth the investment if a player is only going to be fighting light mechs. Sure you have the trade off that you are going to be terrible against assaults, but that's the choice you make when you pick a weapon that hard counters an entire class.
You've made the argument that lock on weapons are bad. The fact that they are bad doesn't mean they require more skill to use though.
If a weapon is bad, it requires more effort and thinking to do the same job. And skill, because the tools provided give less to work with to replace skill. They require more skill to achieve the same result, because face it, you only get so many efforts to win a game before the other guys will eliminate you in the process of winning yours. If X good weapon boating gets you 3 kills before you generally get destroyed, and Y bad weapon normally gets you one, you're going to have to seriously gitgud to use weapon Y to get those 3 kills and match your (lower) skill level with X roflstompypwning your opponents.
Gitguds require skill. Ergo, bad weapons require more skill to succeed at any given measure of success than good ones. Piloting, defensive tactics, positioning, and in the case of missiles, prediction and map knowhow.
Is the man who can forge a sword over a stump with a crude hammer more skilled than the man who can do it equipped with a modern foundry and tools and produce the same quality result? I'd say the higher the quality (that is, the better you do in a game), the more skill is required as the tools (weapons) fall behind.
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